Library Trends 75(2): Cultivating a Critical Disposition in Readers’ Advisory Pedagogy and Practice by Emil Lawrence and Misha Stone

Library Trends 75(2), November 2026, "Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality." 

This post is part of the series where I have a post highlighting each article in the issue.

Everything is tagged "Library Trends", so you can use that link to pull up the features of each article and its authors in reverse chronological order here. Or you can use the page I have created for this entire issue to read any article at any time. All of it is open source and free through Project Muse.

Today it is the second article in the issue. But before I get to that, I also want to note that this article is also the second in Section I, “Laying the Groundwork for Twenty-First-Century Readers’ Advisory Service,” which features four articles that establish the foundation upon which we believe twenty-first-century readers’ advisory service should be built. The authors in this section look at service to readers from theoretical and educational perspectives.  

Here is...

Cultivating a Critical Disposition in Readers’ Advisory Pedagogy and Practice

Emil Lawrence, Misha Stone

pp. 267-288

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2026.a1005543

Abstract: This article presents a pedagogical conversation between two readers’ advisory (RA) educators who aim to promote a critical disposition in their respective classrooms. A critical disposition can be understood as an inclination to actively ask and engage with questions that express normative, transformative perspectives on RA work and its underlying commitments. Critically disposed readers’ advisors evince a keen awareness of the conditions of oppression that govern readers’ lives and, additionally, the transformational and autonomy-enhancing potential of the service they provide. Such a disposition is necessary in a library environment shaped and constrained by long-standing inequities in the book industry, changing technological affordances, disinvestment in our public institutions, and coordinated threats to the freedom to read. These educators address how library practitioners can build facility with the conceptual, practical, and imaginative tools required to serve readers well. The ultimate aim is to initiate a discussion about varied visions for RA education and practice that center responsiveness to the real world in which library patrons orchestrate their reading lives.

Emil Lawrence is an assistant professor in the Library and Information Science Department in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. He works on issues arising at the intersection of library and information ethics, readers and reading, and aesthetics.

Misha Stone is a reader services librarian in Seattle. She is an adjunct instructor of readers’ advisory at the University of Washington’s Information School and served as a 2022 World Fantasy Award judge.

Lawrence, a professor and Stone, a practicing librarian approached their article about how they are  educating the next wave of readers' advisory librarians as a conversation. What I loved about this piece is that they are able to have a serious, academic discussion about the pedagogy of RA education, a discussion that is extremely useful to those who aren't doing the teaching, but are doing the work 

Everyone is enriched when those who teach and those who do actively engage I conversation with each other. 

And I know this because I myself was an adjunct instructor of readers' advisory at Dominican University for 8 years. I became better at being a readers' advisor by teaching it to others, sure, but I became even better at my job by breaking down HOW to teach. I am confident this article will help you in a  similar fashion.

Please click through to read Lawrence and Stone' article here through Project Muse for free (just verify you are a human) or check out my page for Library Trends 75(2). 

Booklist November 2026 Issue is a Spotlight on First Novels and More

On the Cover

From Salt Water Blood, by Manuia Heinrich, with cover art by Isip Xin, published by Sarah Barley Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Salt Water Blood is reviewed in this issue’s Spotlight on First Novels. Illustration © 2026 by Isip Xin. Used by permission of the publisher.

I am sharing content from the current issue of Booklist, with a focus on the spotlight on first novels, with backlist access.

All of these lists are excellent sources for sure bet reading suggestions, displays, and book discussions.

Debuts are a great place to find readers something new to try, a new voice they have never read. And the backlist of debut titles are even better because the author may have more books by the time you go back to read their first, meaning that first novel is like uncovering a hidden gem.

Spotlight on First Novels

Essentials: Recent First Novels about Immigrant Lives
Top 10 First Novels 2026. Backlist: 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021,
Top 10 First Novels on Audio 2026. Backlist: 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021

Features

Manga Essentials: Healing Manga
Book Map: Indigenous America
Essentials: Self-Help on Audio
Booklist Backlist: FemRage

Library Trends Issue 75(2): Stress Versus Libraries by Avery Alexander and Rebecca Reeves

Library Trends 75(2), November 2026, "Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality." 

This post is part of the series where I have a post highlighting each article in the issue.

Everything is tagged "Library Trends", so you can use that link to pull up the features of each article and its authors in reverse chronological order here. Or you can use the page I have created for this entire issue to read any article at any time. All of it is open source and free through Project Muse.

Today it is the first article in the issue. But before I get to that, I also want to note that this article is also the first in Section I, “Laying the Groundwork for Twenty-First-Century Readers’ Advisory Service,” which features four articles that establish the foundation upon which we believe twenty-first-century readers’ advisory service should be built. The authors in this section look at service to readers from theoretical and educational perspectives. 

And first up is:

 Stress Versus Libraries

Avery Alexander, Rebecca Reeves

pp. 238-266

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2026.a1005542

Abstract: As the world we live in changes, due to global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and factors such as politics and poverty, people are experiencing increasing levels of stress in their daily lives. Stress also plays a key role in what people choose to read. With this in mind, how exactly does stress and mood affect one’s reading habits? This paper is a deep dive into how significant cultural events and personal stressors have impacted reading/library usage for patrons and library personnel and how library workers connect with communities. Additionally, this paper will also explore how genre interest has emerged and changed over time. This research will aid library staff with their readers’ advisory endeavors and help readers better understand how their reading interests and habits change based on external and internal factors. 

Avery Alexander is a 2025 graduate of the University of Washington’s Library and Information Science master’s program. Previously, she attended Ithaca College and received her bachelor’s degree in English, with minors in journalism and linguistics. She is currently pursuing her Doctorate of Information Science in Information Science Leadership and Community Engagement at the University of Maryland College Park. Her career and research interests include readers’ advisory, readers’ services, and community engagement, as well as equitable and inclusive library and information practices.

Rebecca Reeves  is a 2025 graduate of the University of Washington’s Library and Information Science master’s program. Before that, she attended the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, located in Belton, Texas, and received her bachelor’s degree in mass communication, with a concentration in journalism and a minor in marketing. Her research interests include mental health, communication strategies and needs, community engagement, and genre trends and interests. 

This article brought Robin and me so much joy to bring to you because it was written as a paper while the two authors were in their graduate library program. We were interviewed as part of their project and were provided with a final paper to see back when they wrote it. We actively solicited them to consider reworking it for this issue.

They were out of school by the time we got to really working on this, but they rose to the occasion and gave us an article that not only was a perfect kick off to the theoretical and education based section to the issue, but also, they captures the moment we are in now by defining "today's reading reality," especially through the lens of those of us who provide service to readers.

I will write about the different voices, writing style, and topics we brought together in this issue throughout this series of posts, but among Robin and my proudest moments in creating this issue is helping to get excellent student work published for everyone to read and learn from.

Please click through to read Alexander and Reeves' article here through Project Muse for free (just verify you are a human) or check out my page for Library Trends 75(2).

What I'm Reading: November 2026 issue of Booklist

The current issue of Booklist has one review by me. As usual, here is the review with bonus appeal info.

Abandoned: Asylum

Edited by James Chambers  
Nov. 2026. 236p. illus. Raw Dog Screaming, paper, $19.99  (9798900580111); e-book (9798900580128). First published. November 1, 2026 (Booklist).

Horror author Chambers has spent many hours walking through the crumbling ruins of King's Park Psychiatric Hospital on Long Island, NY., taking photographs. Like other visitors, he has had strange experiences while there, but unlike other visitors, he decided to take an imaginative approach, sharing the discomfiting weirdness of this place in an anthology, framed as a found document consisting of troubling reports by consultant Enrico Biro each followed by a story or poem connected to the report, such as Clay McLeod Chapman’s “The Groundskeeper,” Elizabeth Massie’s “Gottle o’ Geer” and Jamal Hodge’s “The Ones Forgotten.” This consciously constructed structure allows room for the authors to add their unique voice without letting the volume lose its overall focus, while Biro’s reports and Chambers’ photographs work in tandem to overlay it all with chilling realism. The unsettling mixture of truth and fiction will captivate readers especially those who enjoy horror set in psych wards like The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle or liminal spaces like Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram.

Three Words That Describe This Book: strong sense of place, eerily realistic, psych ward horror

Further Appeal: More words-- found documents, photographs, liminal spaces, consciously constructed world, stories and poems and “reports” and photos– but each story is tied to a report by the fictional and very terrified consultant Enrico Biro.

Example stories– Clay McLeod Chapman– “The Groundskeeper”-- gives you an overview of the terror and a very specific room

Two women tackle how psychiatric hospitals are horrific for young women, especially in the past. "Asylum Areletta "by Mercedes M Yardley and the excellent "Gottle o’Geer" by Elizabeth Massie. There are a few poems as well– "The Ones Forgotten" by Jamal Hidge has stayed with me though.

The contemporary photographs of the very real asylum and the site visit reports – which are a novel on their own if put together– add a layer of discomfort to this combination liminal space psychiatrist hospital horror.

I like how the authors had free reign within the carefully constructed frame. If this were just a collection of psychiatric hospital horror it would not be as good. 

Readalikes:  The best comp for the whole book is Professor Charlatan Bardot’s Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World–  a similarly imaginative and consciously structured anthology by Eric Guignard. But that title was too long for the review. I needed those words. It is on the side bar of the online review though.

Also Daniel Kraus' excellent-- The Ghost That Ate Us is a great comp here. And of course, the ones in the review as well.

Library Trends 75(2) "Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality," Guest Edited by Robin Bradford and Me is Now Available for Free

18 months ago, Robin and I had this post officially opening our call for papers for Library Trends 75(2) "Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality." But our journey toward getting to that call for papers began 6 months before that when Managing Editor, Melissa Wong approached the two of us to float the idea of this issue and our role as Guest Editors. 

That's 2 years from the idea to this moment when we received this email, late last week, from the folks who publish Library Trends:

We are pleased to share that Library Trends 75 (2), “Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality,” has been published. It is available for free online in Project Muse and by mail order from Johns Hopkins University Press. Congratulations on this achievement!

I want to focus on that last word achievement because this is an achievement for Robin and I, sure, but it is for all of us. Robin and I have discussed this many times,  but we never saw ourselves ever editing an academic journal. Not because we didn't think we could. We have both written books, good books, books people have read and use in their work in libraries all over the world.

Rather, we never saw ourselves doing an academic journal because the academic library world does not hold the work we do -- crafting collections and matching books with readers through the public library -- in high enough regard to include it in the academic realm. 

This is the first academic journal dedicated solely to RA and collection development. Robin and I are so proud to add these important services to the academic scholarship of librarianship. It has been published and no one can take ti back now.

Our work giving people leisure reading options has been relegated into the shadows of the academic realm for years. And I say this as someone who taught the RA class at the graduate level for 8 years. And we both say this as people who have written textbooks for library workers. But here we are, today, with a well regarded academic library journal handing over the keys to an entire issue to Robin and I, allowing us to make a call for papers and craft a journal all about the work every one of you reading this does every single day.

Kudos to Melissa Wong and her team at the very well-regarded Library Trends though, they saw the need and went to Robin and I, two proven experts with publishing experience.

We are both happy we got this experience. The academic journal process was foreign to us and Wong and her team were there to help us every step of the way. And trust me, we had a lot of questions, but they never made us feel like a burden for asking them.

And now, we have this almost 300 page tome of brand new scholarship on collection development and readers advisory. The articles are fantastic. They each add something new to the work all of us do every day. And it is all FREE for you to read, use to justify your service to readers, to inspire you to try something new, and more.

We are so proud of this issue. More proud that either of us imagined we could be when we started. And definitely more proud than when we were in the thick of the peer review and editing phases six months ago. 

Coming February 2027-- we will also have webinars highlighting our authors hosted by The University of Illinois iSchool and Booklist. More details soon.

To celebrate the publication and to make sure all of you have access to it, I am doing a few things. 

1. I will be posting 2-3 articles a week over the next 6 weeks here on the blog. I will provide the summary of each article, some context, and a link. I am hoping that by breaking it up, I make it less overwhelming for you to read the full issue.
2. Everything will be tagged "Library Trends" to make it easier to pull them all up, today, tomorrow, and years in the future because some of this scholarship is ground breaking.
3. For those who cannot wait, I created this page where you can access the issue from RA for All's main page at anytime. I have posted each article with the direct link to read it immediately and included the one article that got cut just before the final draft was approved.

All of it is available at this link from Project Muse to read anytime online and it even allows you 1 free PDF download.

Today I want to begin with the introduction Robin and I wrote for the entire issue:

Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality: An Introduction

Robin Bradford, Becky Spratford

pp. 225-237

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2026.a1005541

From the first paragraph of our essay:

This issue of Library Trends begins with and builds upon our work in Antiracist Readers’ Advisory, a program that itself was born, quite honestly, from frustration, after we found ourselves attending the same conferences, speaking on the same panels, and presenting about buying diverse books and providing readers’ advisory services for diverse materials. Over and over again. The frustration came from trying to do justice to these topics in fifteen- to thirty-minute bursts. We were hitting the same main points repeatedly, conference after conference. While that was fine for an introduction, and we knew people were getting some information, we realized not only that library workers needed more robust training but also—and this was key to everything that came after and all that you will encounter in this publication—that the collection development and readers’ advisory that we were each presenting on separately were more intertwined than even we had realized. And we were not alone in this thinking.

We go on to share the story of our experience training libraries through our Actively Anti-Racist Service to Readers programs. 

And then, toward the end we introduce the entire issue, which I am sharing here to get you excited to go and read the articles for yourselves:

Again, in the coming weeks, expect 2-3 articles and their authors to be highlighted here on the blog. I will go in order through the table of contents, but again, you can access it all in any order, at any time here.

We are presenting Library Trends, volume 75, issue 2, “Rethinking Readers’ Advisory for Today’s Reading Reality,” in three distinct sections, building from foundational concepts to practical services for readers of all ages. Section I, “Laying the Groundwork for Twenty-First-Century Readers’ Advisory Service,” features four articles that establish the foundation upon which we believe twenty-first-century readers’ advisory service should be built. The authors look at service to readers from theoretical and educational perspectives. To that end, we are elated to begin with Avery Alexander and Rebecca Reeves presenting the original research they conducted [End Page 234] as part of their master’s degree program at the University of Washington, taking a deep dive into how significant cultural events and personal stressors have impacted reading and library usage for patrons and library personnel and how library workers connect with communities. Their instructor for that program, Misha Stone, along with Emil Lawrence, a professor from Rutgers, follow with a pedagogical conversation about how they promote a critical disposition in their respective classrooms in order to initiate a larger discussion about visions for readers’ advisory education and practice that center responsiveness to the real world in which library patrons orchestrate their reading lives. Next, four librarians—Michael Adams, Catherine Bryant, Abby Dawson, and Ellen Forsyth—from New South Wales, Australia, pick up this educational conversation by sharing how they created a localized, collaborative, and efficient training model to deliver readers’ advisory–focused professional development in an online context. Finally, the section concludes with Karen Toonen presenting an argument for how to properly weed a popular reading collection, an activity for a type of collection that has been mostly ignored in the existing literature on weeding.

Section II, “Building a Community of Readers from Birth Through College,” consists of four articles that examine how we serve our youngest readers as they grow into the adult readers who will come to use our services in the public library. Julie Jurgens sets the stage with a provocative and incisive exploration of America’s history of prejudice against children and systemic lack of support for families. She compares and contrasts this with actual best practices regarding child development, caregiving styles, and how children actually engage with books. The result is a model for us to reframe the narrative regarding children’s access to books, one where children are active participants in making the choices that directly impact their lives, starting with the small but significant act of choosing what books they want to read. Raenell “Rain” M. Smith and Michele Reilly follow Jurgens with a case study on crafting a readers’ advisory program within a high school setting that centers students’ needs while creating lifelong learners and pleasure readers. This section concludes with two case studies of serving college students. Tyler Rodrigues writes about the University of Idaho’s Hit the Book(s) Club, discussing observations derived from the program and the benefits seen from student testimonials. Amanda M. Lowe and Lauren Puzier present how the University at Albany Libraries reframed readers’ advisory as an active, student-centered strategy that supports wellness, intellectual curiosity, and engagement.

And finally, in section III, “Fostering Community and Belonging Through Readers’ Advisory in the Public Library,” we present six articles that showcase how readers’ advisory service is about more than putting the right book into our readers’ hands; rather, it can be a pathway toward what should be the ultimate goal of all public library service—creating [End Page 235] community and fostering belonging. This section leads off with Carina Stopenski proposing an additional appeal factor for the deeply entrenched appeal-based system used by readers’ advisors around the world, coining the phrase “emotional-situational appeal” and explaining how it can be used to connect with neurodivergent readers. Next, Adam Lopez explains how queer book clubs at his library have fostered empathy and built support for queer people throughout their Kansas community. Wang Junfei shares the results of a user experience study of reader services on urban rail transit in Zhejiang Province, China. We then bring you back over the Pacific Ocean to Springfield, Missouri, where Konrad Stump explains how he has used programming centered around books and authors to build community investment in readers’ advisory, while Stephanie Sendaula follows with an article about the importance of nonfiction readers’ advisory as a tool for social justice. This issue ends on a very practical note, as Sara McBride and Chantal Wilson share how Richland Library in Columbia, South Carolina, has been encouraging readers to expand their reading horizons with the Broader Bookshelf reading challenge since 2017.

Now, it is your turn. We invite you to join us on this curated journey, as we present a model for what twenty-first-century collection development and readers’ advisory should look like, through the words of those who are already setting the standard and pushing their ideas and concepts forward, with the ultimate goal of preserving it all for others to study and use as an example to build upon for themselves going forward. Let us all rethink readers’ advisory for today’s reading reality together.

In the coming weeks, expect 2-3 articles and their authors to be highlighted here on the blog. I will go in order through the table of contents, but again, you can access it all in any order, at any time here.

Let's do this! Let's show those academics that we can stand toe to toe with them. 

Reminder: Backlist Can Become Frontlist At Any Time

In libraries we are usually ready for a previously popular book to come back into the public consciousness. Today's example is Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou:

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers.

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work. 

For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. 

Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.

Back in 2018 this book was everywhere. And it stayed popular for quite a while. I did this book as a book discussion title in February of 2020 with ARRT and you can read the notes here.

I read it with my ears as an audiobook, so did my husband. Very few books overlap like that for us. It was bonkers to see what Elizabeth Holmes was able to do. It was also a refreshing true crime story that did not involve a serial killer.

Well, you all know where this is going..... Obviously Bad Blood is back and paperback sales of this book are, once again, through the roof as reported by PW here because of the popularity of the documentary You Can See Everything.

This book was still in most library collections because it was so critically acclaimed and Holmes had stayed in the news meaning people sought the book out on a regular enough basis that it was not weeded. And now, it is checked out in every possible format at most libraries (including my own). 

So first things first, good news if you still own it. Yes you can add more paperback copies or ebooks to satisfy demand. But also because it is an older title that was popular back when it first came out, there are MANY Reddit threads of readalike options. (Scroll past the AI options).

And there are also great threads of Reddit book suggestions for non-murder true crime.

We are not going to be able to keep adding copies to satisfy demand on this one. And, interest in this title isn't going away anytime soon. The movie will stay on the radar and in the mainstream discussion from now through the Academy Awards in March 2027.

So add what you can, but use this opportunity to make displays and lists of your MANY true crime offerings that are NOT murder-based that they can enjoy while they wait.

Viral books and movies bring people into the library, sometimes for the first time in years (and "into the library" is also if they only access us through Libby). Sure they will be slightly disappointed if Bad Blood isn't available. but when you show them so many other awesome choices to enjoy while they wait their turn, many (not all of course) will be excited to rediscover the library and all it has to offer.

And all of this is possible because we don't just keep the newest books on our shelves. We always have great titles from the past that are still great reads if only our patrons knew there were there, hiding in the stacks.